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"Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Chapter One

Black Female Spectatorship and the Supermama Heroine

She's the Godmother ... The baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit the town!

—Coffy ad

I am the baddest chick.... I'll show you magic.

—Lil' Kim, "Magic Stick"

Black seeing: Going to the Movies While Black

"The thing about Cleopatra is that she was sharp, you know?"

"I liked the way she looked. And talked. Just the way she spoke was so sophisticated and cool."

"I like her look, the way she carried herself; her whole vibe is sharp to me. And she was a dark-skinned, strong, beautiful woman. That's what I like." That from my friend Zina B, a postmodern, Manolo Blahnik–wearing, majestic chocolate Cleopatra diva herself.

I was in Atlanta at Zina B's house with her mother and sister, my sister, and several other women between thirty and forty-five. We had gathered to watch Cleopatra Jones and one of Pam Grier's films, Coffy. Two of the ladies remembered seeing Cleopatra Jones back in the day, two more had seen it on video, and for the rest it was a first viewing of the film starring a nevertheless familiar screen character. We had just finished watching it—which was an experience of communal bonding and interactive spectating. We laughed in glee when Cleopatra kicked some so-called tough guy's or chick's butt, shared and yelled our appreciation at her high chic appearance—"We ain't mad at you, girl"—and held a running conversation about her animal print fur coats, high-brimmed hats, tailored man suits, and majestic, ebony physique. At the end of the movie, we were feeling good and talking about how bad Tamara Dobson as Cleopatra was and wondering who in the world could play that role now. Only a Grace Jones–like diva, we agreed, but who?

The conversation became a little less enthused as I slipped in Coffy—we'd all seen it at least once. Zina B volunteered that she liked Grier—who was really beautiful—but hated the Coffy-type roles "'cause they were too degrading." Another one of the sisters who had seen many of the blaxploitation films at the movies as a teen offered that at least Coffy and Foxy won. Back in a 1974 Ms. article, "Keeping the Black Woman in Her Place," Margaret Sloan, a founder and chairwoman of the National Black Feminist Organization, appreciated the rarity of a fighting black woman action movie character like Coffy, saying she loved her despite the limitations of the narrative. In a 1975 interview with Grier, Jamaica Kincaid echoes Sloan, describing Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba Baby (1975) as technically flawed and violent films with one "outstanding redeeming value": the films offered the rare Hollywood showing of an "independent, resourceful, self-confident, strong, and courageous" woman. "Above all," Kincaid stresses, "they are the only films to show us a woman who triumphs!"

Grier has said that her roles "exemplified women's independence." She projected shades of her African American women relatives' tough attitudes and no-nonsense business personas into her portrayal of Foxy Brown. "I based my screen characters," Grier reveals, "on my mother, aunts, and grandmothers. They were the kind of women who would fight to their last breath before they'd give their purse to some punk robber." Grier herself came up with a few of the resourceful survival maneuvers in both Coffy and Foxy Brown. For example, in the first film, Coffy escapes a violent encounter with some other women by pulling out a switchblade that she's hidden in her Afro. In the latter, Foxy uses her car to rescue her brother, and in another scene, the infamous lesbian brawl, Foxy artfully uses a chair to fend off some hostile Amazon-sized women.

I queried various black women viewers by distributing a survey that posed several key questions: Did you like these black female heroines and their films (Coffy, Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones)? How would you describe any or all of these films and roles (Grier's or Dobson's)? What do you remember about them? What did or do you like about them? Dislike? The most oft-repeated sentiment by the respondents was that they liked that the characters were strong women, but their appreciation of black female heroines who fought back didn't negate what many black women referred to as the over-sexualization, even degradation, of Grier in the films.

The women I surveyed varied in age from twenty-two to sixty, with the majority between thirty-five and fifty-five. While most were professional women, about a fourth were working-class. Their introduction to and historical relationship with the films also varied. Some were young adults and adolescents at the time of the films' release and had viewed them first at the movies and over the years at least once again through cable television or video. A handful of the respondents were hip-hop-generation viewers who knew Coffy and Foxy Brown through videos and the confiscation of blaxploitation in hip-hop culture—fashion, music, film references, and movie remakes. I had several small-group movie sessions with a handful of women who were viewing the films for the first time since seeing them at the time of their release. While all of the women were familiar with Pam Grier, Foxy Brown, and Grier's blaxploitation film roots, several had never viewed Cleopatra Jones or heard of the film or Tamara Dobson.

While the younger generation viewers tended to demonstrate less antagonism toward the explicit relationship of sex and female power drawn in the films, black women across class and age were quite savvy about recognizing how the character representations of the superheroines were shaped by, as one sister wrote, a "white man's fantasy vision" that somewhat celebrated stereotypes of black female sexuality. Quite a few women, of the seventy-five or so who replied, also noted the difference between the overt exploitative aspects of Coffy and Foxy Brown and the rather sophisticated presentation of a black superwoman in Cleopatra Jones. Of course, more than to the filmmakers' radical vision, we owe the considerably softened sexual representation of Cleopatra Jones in part due to the effort of the male producers to achieve a PG rating, thus maximizing its box office potentia1.

In her review of Cleopatra Jones, Sloan finds more empowerment in the tough woman presented by Dobson's character. While that narrative too fell below "art," Sloan applauds Cleopatra Jones for at least being "her own woman." At the end of her review, Sloan calls for more black women on the screen and throughout the film industry as producers, directors, and editors in order to present the fullness of black female experience. But for that moment, she suggests, Cleopatra Jones spoke to the yearning of many black women for more complex and empowered black woman representations. As a sister sitting behind Sloan at the movie's end declared, "Damn. That movie felt good."

Film critics such as Ed Guerrero and Jesse Rhines have noted that blaxploitation films were geared toward a young urban black male audience. Yet, we know that through theater screenings, video and DVD rentals, and cable television that in the thirty years since the films' emergence, a few generations of black women culture and film consumers have been part of the blaxploitation audience. When it was released back in 1973, Cleopatra Jones made over $3.25 million in commercial release and spawned a successful soundtrack that sold over half a million copies. Coffy, produced that same year for $500,000, made $2 million. In domestic film rentals, Foxy Brown made $2.46 million. Guerrero concurs with black film historian Donald Bogle and other black male critics that "black women could find little in their adolescent-male-fantasy-oriented roles to identify with." The problem with this dismissive reading is that it obscures how black women may negotiate the racial and gender politics underlying the narrative but still find various types of pleasure in viewing action cinema generally and the rare fantasies of a baad black woman heroine, especially one headlining a Hollywood film.

Film theorist Judith Mayne points out that textual theories of the spectator have offered that cinema structure "assigns a position of coherence to the implied spectator," yet we must recognize that various real viewers may see the films in far more diverse ways than that intended by filmmakers and marketers. The crucial feat is not to view the texts as having complete or dominant control over viewing positions, though the film controllers may have intended spectators and their expectations in mind. We must also avoid the other extreme of viewing movies as only offering positions created by viewers. A more appropriate approach would be to address the complex ways that "meanings are both assigned and created." There is a distance between the "cinematic address," or how a text presumes specific spectator responses, and "cinematic reception," the actual responses of viewers and the conditions surrounding them.

It is especially challenging to attempt to shed light on black female spectatorial desire, since it has been largely ignored in mainstream and feminist film criticism. Fortunately, black cultural and film critics such as bell hooks, Jacqueline Bobo, and Manthia Diawara, among others, have offered the beginnings of a developing body of black film criticism highlighting race and gender and offering some particular focus on black women viewers. By directing critical focus to black women's responses to such key African American women–oriented films as the film adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and filmmaker Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, hooks and Bobo have helped to challenge the gender and racial exclusiveness of such early psychoanalytic feminist readings as Laura Mulvey's pioneering 1971 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In it, Mulvey ignores the racial implications of patriarchal film structure and possible viewing positions.

Trying to study black female viewers in relation to the 1970s supermama action flicks—the missing link in popular film studies—is additionally challenging because of the lack of attention, then and now, in contrast to more well-documented public responses to films like Shaft, Super Fly, and Sweetback, primarily by black male viewers and critics. In addition, the familiar question arises of what strategies are appropriate and adequate for gaining a valid enough sense of a specific viewing audience without seeming to offer a definitive accounting—which is, of course, an impossibility.

The historical problems of stereotypical black film imagery and black exclusion in dominant cinema has unsurprisingly meant that the critical address of black film spectatorship has tended to revolve around how black viewers have negotiated and continue to negotiate the politics of dominant cinema ideologies. Recognizing that the position of the spectator in cinematic apparatus is socially, historically, and "psychically constituted," Diawara has offered a way of interrogating African American spectating of dominant cinema through "resisting spectatorship." Here, Diawara reads D. W. Griffith's pioneering film The Birth of a Nation (1915), discussing how the dominant politics of the narrative "compels the Black spectator to identify with the racial inscription of the Black character" and observing at the same time the resistance of the black spectator to this fantasy version of United States history. Thus, "resisting spectatorship" denotes a resistance to the racist encoding of the text. The dominant cinema positions black characters largely for the "pleasure" of white viewers. In contrast to the denial of spectatorial identification with black characters in narratives where they lose, Coffy, Foxy Brown, and black male hero flicks like Shaft and Super Fly offer this sort of potential identification for black male and female viewers. Diawara's discussion raises the pivotal question of how various black spectators might identify with dominant cinema representations of blacks and addresses issues of "passive identification."

bell hooks has offered helpful analyses of black spectatorship and black female spectatorship in particular. She suggests the existence of an interrogating gaze that challenges dominant construction. Echoing cultural theorist Stuart Hall, hooks argues that spaces for agency are possible for black people who can "both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see." She offers a crucial reading of the politics of gender infusing the black male gaze as well as the dominant racist and gendered gaze. In their role as spectators, she argues, black men could engage phallocentric power that "mediated racial negation" in this imaginary zone. Such a reading exemplifies the phallocentric gaze structuring Sweetback, The Spook, and many blaxploitation films that overtly offer sexualized fantasies of black phallic power that were intended to appeal particularly to a black heterosexual male viewership.

Given these gendered politics, black female spectators have had to navigate a cinematic apparatus that situates their presence as "absence" and denies the black female body in order to reinforce or support white supremacy and the phallocentric gaze. Black women movie lovers have mediated their moviegoing amid dominant constructions of black women as Sapphire—the "black bitch." Referring to the movie classic The Birth of a Nation too, hooks observes that black women spectators have been very conscious of how the politics of race have underlined gender representation. However, many black women spectators have looked with an oppositional gaze that enables them to interrogate critically the positioning of white womanhood as the "object of the phallocentric gaze" and then decide not to "identify with either the victim or the perpetrator." In this way, a critical space is opened up for the deconstruction of the phallocentric gaze and the positioning of women.

It has been unfortunate that mainstream feminist film criticism has neglected black female spectatorship. Looking at this subject requires acknowledging and understanding the role and impact of the historical mainstream devaluation of black womanhood in media on black women's looking and movie experience. Black women's ways of resistance to the dominant cinematic apparatus is essential for the emergence of a critical black female spectatorship.

There is still much to be explored about how black viewers navigate mainstream cinema, black-oriented commercially produced films, black independent cinema, and the activity of going to the movies. One of the aspects of black moviegoing that has been little explored relates to black audiences' collective experience of looking at or viewing film within various public spaces. Black viewers prior to the modern legal (as well as social) breakdown of Jim Crow very often saw movies collectively at theaters from the balcony—that is, in segregated spaces that positioned them as secondary viewers. Black viewers have had to negotiate not only looking but also the actual act of seeing movies in the public sphere. In spaces that did not cater to a black clientele and in those that did, as was often the case with the theater showings of such black films as Sweetback and Shaft, an important part of the experience was watching films in collectivity and as part of smaller gendered and classed groups within the larger black audience.

Addressing black spectatorship in ways that acknowledge these aspects can enlarge the important consideration of the ways black audiences navigate the racist gaze of dominant cinema. Film theorist Jacqueline Stewart offers an approach that embodies this effort with her conceptualization of "reconstructive spectatorship." Here, Stewart addresses the diverse manner in which "black viewers attempted to reconstitute and assert themselves in relation to the classical cinema's racist social and textual operations." By giving important attention to the "public dimension of spectatorship" or "the public context of exhibition," Stewart encompasses the "collective, the contextual, and the physical dimensions of black spectatorship," thus moving beyond the stress, in her words, on the "individual, the textual, and the psychic." Stewart's approach enlarges hooks's and Diawara's crucial work by in part encompassing black cinema scholar Mark Reid's idea of "'polyphonic' spectatorship," which allows for viewers' readings of "black-oriented" films from various multiple "social and psychic (and not simply racial) positions." Stewart explains that her reconstructive spectatorship aims to address the viewer as part of a viewing public rather than as just the individual viewer.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas by STEPHANE DUNN Copyright © 2008 by Stephane Dunn. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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